Soft serve

Soft serve is a type of ice cream that is softer than regular ice creams as a result of air being introduced during freezing. Soft serve ice cream has been sold commercially since the late 1930s.

History

Over Memorial Day weekend of 1934, Tom Carvel, the founder of the Carvel brand and franchise, suffered a flat tire in his ice cream truck in Hartsdale, New York. He pulled into a parking lot and began selling his melting ice cream to vacationers driving by. Within two days he had sold his entire supply of ice cream and concluded that both a fixed location and soft (as opposed to hard) frozen desserts were potentially good business ideas. In 1936, Carvel opened his first store on the original broken down truck site and developed a secret soft serve ice cream formula as well as patented super low temperature ice cream machines.

Dairy Queen also claims to have invented soft serve. In 1938, near Moline, Illinois, J. F. McCullough and his son, Alex, developed their soft serve formula. Their first sales experiment was August 4, 1938, in Kankakee, Illinois at the store of their friend, Sherb Noble. Within two hours of the "all you can eat" trial sale, they had dished out more than 1,600 servings — more than one every 4.5 seconds.

Irresistible Bliss

Irresistible Bliss was Soul Coughing's second album, released in 1996). The band initially planned for Tchad Blake, producer of their first album, Ruby Vroom, to produce the album, but the death of a family member in a car accident caused Blake to take a hiatus. Over the objections of his bandmates and his record label, Slash Records/Warner Bros., frontman Mike Doughty (then billed as "M. Doughty") hired producer David Kahne (Fishbone, The Bangles, Sublime, Tony Bennett, Sugar Ray, The Strokes); he was intent on following up the wild sonics of Ruby Vroom with a tightly-wound, trembly, New Wave inspired record.

The tracking, at Manhattan's Power Station recording studio, was complete in eleven days, and Doughty was jubilant at the results. Doughty tapped Steve Fisk to produce the tune "Unmarked Helicopters" for The X Files soundtrack Songs in the Key of X.

All of Irresistible Bliss' songs were produced by Kahne, except tracks 2 and 6 (by Fisk) and track 12 by the band themselves. The mixing process split the tracks between three mixers: Kahne, Chris Shaw, and Ruby producer Tchad Blake, who intervened when bass player Sebastian Steinberg briefly quit the band.